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NASA Langley Research Center is looking at an $829 million proposed budget for fiscal year 2016 — a healthy $60 million more than its 2015 enacted budget of $769 million, officials announced Monday. All of that increase, however, plus millions more are earmarked to build a new laboratory on the center's Hampton campus. If the $94 million in construction costs were factored out, the center's budget would fall $14 million short of 2015's. But center director Stephen Jurczyk said he believes those numbers alone don't tell the whole story and predicts the center will make up the difference and then some. "In the mission directorate side, it appears like our...

Related "NASA Mars Exploration Program" Articles

NASA Langley Research Center is looking at an $829 million proposed budget for fiscal year 2016 — a healthy $60 million more than its 2015 enacted budget of $769 million, officials announced Monday.
All of that increase, however, plus millions more are...

That jelly doughnut on Mars? Not so much ...
NASA just announced that the jelly doughnut-shaped whatsis that its Opportunity rover camera captured recently is, in fact, a rock.
Researchers claim the weird specimen -- about 1.5 inches wide,...

The pilot of a small plane that crashed at a Los Angeles intersection was a NASA and Jet Propulsion Labs researcher who helped determine that there was once water on the surface of Mars, his colleagues said.
Alberto Behar, 47, of Scottsdale, Arizona,...

It turns out the Beagle has landed after all — but it never called home.
The gone-but-not-forgotten spacecraft went AWOL on Christmas Day, 2003, when it was supposed to land on Mars and start transmitting data back to Earth.
Instead, the British-built...

Billions of years ago, a lake once filled the 96-mile-wide crater being explored by NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity, bolstering evidence that the planet most like Earth in the solar system was suitable for microbial life, scientists said on Monday.
The new...

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has released the first resolved images of comet Siding Spring's nucleus -- and it's a lot smaller than people expected.
The nucleus of the comet that zoomed past the Red Planet on Sunday appears to be about half its...

A NASA spacecraft designed to investigate how Mars lost its water is expected to put itself into orbit around the Red Planet on Sunday after a 10-month journey.
After traveling 442 million miles from Earth, the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution,...

A NASA robotic spacecraft fired its braking rockets on Sunday, ending a 10-month journey to put itself into orbit around Mars and begin a hunt for the planet's lost water.After traveling 442 million miles, the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or...

They are literally specks of dust, tiny bits of primordial material that wouldn't be visible to the naked eye.
But for spacecraft in orbit around Mars, they could become minuscule agents of destruction.
These dust particles will come hurtling past the...

Description: Unusual proteins within microbes allow the organisms to survive in cold and salty conditions in Antarctica, and could in theory help support life on Mars as well, according to NASA-funded study at the University of Maryland School of...

The most high-fidelity search for methane on Mars has turned up none, a result that significantly reduces the chances of finding microbial life on the Red Planet.
The highly awaited results of tests conducted by NASA’s Curiosity rover do not completely...

This week in New York will.i.am — the founder and frontman of L.A.'s Black Eyed Peas — is to receive an honorary Clio Award in recognition of "the work and talent of those who push the boundaries of creativity in advertising and beyond,"...

Scientists working on NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory mission have been somewhat sparing until now when describing exactly how the rocks drilled, gobbled and cooked by the Curiosity rover paint a picture of a life-friendly environment.
Well, no more. In a...

Unimpressed by Michael Jackson’s iconic moonwalk? How about a "Marswalk"? NASA’s Curiosity rover showed off its fancy footwork on the Red Planet this week by driving backward. The Mars Science Laboratory robot just finished its longest drive...

The saga of the jelly doughnut-shaped rock on Mars has taken a strange turn -- to a federal court.
On Monday, Rhawn Joseph, who describes himself as a neuroscientist and astrobiologist, filed court papers demanding that NASA do more to investigate the...

If Mars once contained life, it might have existed in watery oases far beneath the surface, according to a new study analyzing a deep Martian crater holding signs of an ancient lake.
The research, published online Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience,...